What spring/damper/friction value to use

[TheFlyingKerman]

I think I understand their physical meanings. What I am asking is whether there is any rule of thumb for setting these? For instance if I am sending a 0.8t rover with 4 rigged wheels to the Mun, expecting the wheels to absorb jumps of several hundred meters, how should I set up my wheel?

[swjr-swis]

1 hour ago, TheFlyingKerman said:

I think I understand their physical meanings. What I am asking is whether there is any rule of thumb for setting these? For instance if I am sending a 0.8t rover with 4 rigged wheels to the Mun, expecting the wheels to absorb jumps of several hundred meters, how should I set up my wheel?

With wheels the way they are in KSP at the moment, the only rule of thumb that is 100% guaranteed to be true is: if you drive a wheel over your thumb, it'll hurt.

In a properly working game, the default settings should cover most of the logical use cases without problems. But wheels in KSP are still not working properly, since a Unity engine update a few versions ago broke them. Expect unpredictable behaviour, regardless of any claims by anyone of specific values being better.

That said:

• Spring and damper - I don't bother changing these from the defaults unless the vehicle starts bouncing spontaneously at loading (which does happen with some regularity). Even then, there seems to be very little logical correlation between the settings and the behaviour. I just keep trying different settings until it stops bouncing.
• Friction - I usually apply low friction on front wheels and high friction on the back. This seems to minimize random skating and makes turning at speed a bit more predictable.